Thanks to our loyal customers, we are excited to announce that our Symphony® / VersaGel® 3D culture platform has been nominated for the Best New Drug Discovery & Development Product of 2018 in the Scientists’ Choice Awards.

The annual SelectScience Scientists' Choice Awards celebrate the industry’s best and most effective technologies and give scientists the chance to recognize the top new products which have most advanced their work.

Voting is open until January 25, 2019 and you can cast your for Symphony/VersaGel here. Everyone who votes will have the option to be enrolled for a chance to win a $500 Amazon Gift Card from SelectScience. An additional chance to win a $400 Amazon Gift Card from SelectScience will be offered to scientists who submit a review of the Symphony/VersaGel platform.

The winner will be announced during a special ceremony at the SLAS2019 Conference in Washington, D.C., USA, on February 4, 2019.

At Cypre, we want to express our deep gratitude to all of our customers and champions for their continued business and making nominations like this possible. We look forward to serving you and new customers in 2019 and beyond.

Cypre and Molecular Devices have begun a collaboration to showcase the synergy between Cypre’s next generation 3D cell culture platform and Molecular Devices’ ImageXpress high content imagers. Cypre’s patented Symphony® and VersaGel® platform produces optically clear, flat gels that are particularly suited for high content imaging. Results from the collaboration will be presented in a poster at SLAS 2019.

As more and more research is poised to move from 2D to 3D, researchers are in search of solutions that are not only reproducible and biologically predictive but also are easy to deploy and scalable. Our goal at Cypre is to use our 3D culture expertise and next generation tools, as well as our synergy with high content and other automated analyses, to deliver on those requirements. We look forward to further collaborating with Molecular Devices and other high content imaging partners to strengthen the larger 3D culture solution being delivered to the market.

In the study referenced in Dr. Blake’s presentation, Genentech collaborated with Cypre to build a 3D tumor model showcasing immune cell exclusion, a hallmark of some cancers that has resulted in immunotherapy failures costing $Billions in R&D. Dr. Blake described how Cypre helped them build their 3D tumor model using the VersaGel/Symphony platform, and specifically how they created the tumor, stromal and immune cell components in a 3D fashion in 24-well and 96-well microplates.

Dr. Blake’s presentation discussed how it was found that VersaGel’s stiffness and degradability of the matrix played an important role in tumor growth and T-cell migration. Moreover, the fibrotic layer incorporated into the 3D cell model provided a structural barrier to limit T-cell penetration to the surface region of the tumor, effectively recapitulating their clinical observations recently published in Nature. Without the barrier, T cells were able to more freely penetrate the tumor in VersaGel, suggesting the stromal layer provided chemical and/or physical cues attenuating T-cell response and killing of the tumor cells. Genentech will now explore testing various therapeutics in this 3D immune exclusion model for their ability to influence T-cell function.

When asked about the collaboration, Kolin Hribar, PhD, Cypre’s founder and CEO, said “It’s an important milestone to see this project spawn into therapeutic discovery and development at Genentech. Our team is thrilled to work with Rob and Genentech’s excellent team of scientists and researchers for this collaboration.”

We caught up with Dr. Blake via email recently to ask him more about what role he thought Cypre’s VersaGel/Symphony would play in his research. He said, “Cancer-Immunology is currently a mouse-intensive pursuit. The development of novel drugs that target the cancer-immune system interaction will require more sophisticated in vitro 3D co-culture models than those typically applied to traditional cancer drug development. We hope that the technology offered by Cypre will help us apply these models to our drug discovery process.”

Contact us to learn more about how Symphony and VersaGel can deliver next generation 3D culture to your lab.

Here is Dr. Blake’s full abstract from the LRIG conference:

Comparison of 3D Technologies and Their Applications to a Cancer Immunology Model

Robert Blake, Genentech, South San Francisco, CA

The interaction of cells of the immune system with cancers is currently a major focus of many research labs and pharmaceutical companies, with a goal of developing more effective cancer therapies. 3D co-culture methods offer the prospect of being able to recapitulate the immune system - tumor interaction, in an in vitro setting. These types of in vitro methods will be important for developing and studying novel therapeutics for cancer treatment. We have used the MC38ova mouse colon carcinoma model in co-culture with fibroblasts and endothelial cells and treatment with CD8+ T-cells, to evaluate several different 3D cell culture technologies. Our goal was to learn the pros and cons of each technology and their ability to generate meaningful data in vitro for guiding cancer immunology drug discovery projects. We will discuss an interim analysis of what we have learned to date from these studies.

We here at Cypre are always excited to get a chance to interact with researchers doing meaningful work in the field. That's why we were happy when our friends at Sartorius asked us to discuss the Symphony and VersaGel 3D culture platform at a San Francisco Bay Area user group meeting for their IncuCyte and IntelliCyte customers on October 2, 2018. VersaGel's optical clarity and ability to be easily digested make it a great fit for both IncuCyte and IntelliCyte users.

Send us a note if you are interested in seeing our presentation or visit cypre.co to learn more and request a free demo.

As part of its 5 year sponsorship of the MBC Biolabs (qb3@953) life sciences incubator, Amgen hosted a panel discussion at their South San Francisco campus on September 20, 2018. The goal of the panel was to give Amgen postdocs and opportunity to learn more about the current biotech start-up scene. Topics for discussion included starting and growing a biotech company, how to hire, the value of mentorship and networking and the future of biotech.

As a resident of the MBC Labs (qb3@953) incubator in San Francisco, Cypre was invited to join the panel. Our founder and CEO, Dr. Kolin Hribar, PhD, talked about his experiences alongside other San Francisco life science and biotech companies (Mission Bio, Mitokinin, BioEclipse Therapeutics, Dahlia Bio, Delve Therapeutics). We were excited to have Cypre represented in the panel and would like to thank Amgen for the invitation. “It was a great opportunity to listen to my peers and engage Amgen's amazing postdocs and staff. I believe learning is the key to developing, regardless of your level!” Dr. Hribar said after panel.

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Cypre is pleased to announce the launch of new products VersaGel™-Immunology for immuno-oncology assays (eg T cell infiltration) and VersaGel™-Oncology Kit for tumor cell proliferation, viability, and invasion.

Cypre presents at the XYZ Technology Forum, hosted by Hemi Ventures, where industry and academic experts discuss the 2018 Top 10 Emerging Technology Predictions report at the Palace Hotel, San Francisco.

Cypre's founder and CEO, Kolin, moderates a panel discussing the technological challenges and opportunities such as 3D tumor models in improving pharmaceutical discovery and translation into the clinic.